“What if Americans Had Listened to Black Women in the 1800’s?”

Award-winning scholar Koritha Mitchell (she/her) shares insights from editing the work of Harriet Jacobs while witnessing the Supreme Court’s commitment to ending abortion access and limiting the right to vote. Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is the first book-length autobiography by a formerly enslaved African American woman. Despite facing obstacles typically avoided by white women and Black men, Jacobs published her life story in 1861. This work sheds light on the experience of a particular demographic—nineteenth-century Black women. In the process, it exposes American culture’s fundamental beliefs as the nation built its foundation on treating Black women not as people but as chattels, moveable pieces of property. Using Harriet Jacobs as a case study, Mitchell shows how Black women were model citizens who could not vote. Even while enslaved, Jacobs exemplified the critical thinking of engaged citizenship. Her writing exposes the brutally inventive creativity of the nation’s most vaunted nonfiction texts. Jacobs proves to be unequivocal: legal statutes exert very real pressure on her life, but they rely on the relentlessly reiterated fiction that she is not fully human and deserves no rights. Mitchell is the English Department’s endowed Katherine Kearney Carpenter Lecturer. This event will take pace in the Benes Rooms of the Hamilton-Williams Campus Center, and it is free and open to the public.